


corrosive spark of hope

by victoriousscarf



Category: Black Panther (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Erik lives, Explicit Language, M/M, Not Really Character Death, Tumblr Prompt, Wananda has great mental health services, the snap, this was the prompt that got way away from me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 04:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21207314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/victoriousscarf/pseuds/victoriousscarf
Summary: “I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice.”





	corrosive spark of hope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thegreatpumpkin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegreatpumpkin/gifts).

The thing was.

The thing was Erik still hated T’Challa in ways he had pretty much gotten over everyone else. 

After all it had been T’Challa who lied to him, who saved his life when Erik told him to let him die. It was later T’Challa who pulled him out of the cell he didn’t even know he had been in to tell him they needed his _help_. There were aliens coming, someone who wanted to destroy half of all life in the universe and would he please just put his hurt and his betrayal to one side and use that rage to save them?

So Erik had because honestly, he was pretty _fucking_ angry and tearing apart a few aliens sounded like a great idea.

Except then the world fell apart and suddenly T’Challa was just _gone_, and Shuri would have been next in line and she was gone too, and that left the Queen Mother and him staring at each other while M’Baku stood to one side, pretending he didn’t give a damn if they tore each other apart. 

“We’re not giving you the throne,” Ramonda said, leveling him with a look.

“No?” he had asked, aiming for innocent disinterest. 

“No,” she said, as firm as the first time. “But,” and she hesitated. “Wakanda does need a Black Panther.”

So somehow Erik found himself helping to hold Wakanda together. It was funny, in a weird way, because they were spending an awful lot of their time helping the rest of the world too. And sure, he would have liked to help the poor nations more than the former colonial powers, but with half the world gone, they were all desperate. 

It was, to say the least, a weird fucking feeling.

Nakia was the one who showed him T’Challa’s efforts at reaching out to the world, the new Wakanda center where his father had been murdered. He wasn’t sure if he was mollified or furious.

He almost wanted to apologize to her though for trying to kill her boyfriend when it turned out, aside from a certain level of violence, he and she agreed on a lot. 

So there he was, Wakanda’s Black Panther, because the world had fallen apart and they could only do what they could. 

Eventually he had practically forgiven everyone, including Okoye, except T’Challa, because he was dead. Erik could wrap up all the bitter poison left in his chest and direct it at the one who lied to him, the one who wasn’t there. T’Challa was dead and Erik never had to forgive him.

(His therapist had some thoughts about that, but then again they had thoughts about just about everything they pried out of Erik in the twice weekly sessions Ramonda had deposited him in. Turned out, Wakanda even had better mental health services than the rest of the world, go fucking figure). 

But people moved on. They figured out how to keep going and he figured out how to actually live without spitting up his poison on everyone in his path. 

Which of course meant when the world went upside down again and aliens came out of the sky for the second time, everyone blinked back into existence right where they had disappeared five years ago.

Erik knew what that meant the moment the field in front of the city suddenly filled with confused soldiers. But he pretended he didn’t until after the battle, when he looked up and T’Challa was right in front of him, those warm eyes so big in his face and Erik wanted to sink his claws into his cheeks just to get him to stop. 

“Sup, coz?” he drawled instead and T’Challa opened his mouth but he was called away before he could actually say anything. He went with a look over his shoulder and a frown.

Erik managed to avoid T’Challa again after that, because he knew T’Challa was going to be actively seeking him out. Even M’Baku knew T’Challa was going to be coming straight for him, and that seemed to amuse him.

Erik was quickly downgrading just how much he could stand M’Baku when Ramonda was the one to put her foot down. 

“You’re avoiding him.”

“Yeah,” Erik said, casually, because he had spent most of the week since the battle outside the outskirts of the city, trying to find housing for all the people who were suddenly back. 

There were a lot of adjustments being made, not least of all the fact that people had gotten married to other people, moved into other houses, and many of the empty houses had been torn down because they didn’t have the resources to upkeep buildings that weren’t being used. 

“He just wants to talk to you,” she said and over the last five years they had established something of a respect for each other. She was his queen now, and he had never been able to swallow the orders of someone else since he left the military the way he could her's. 

“I don’t want to talk to him,” Erik replied. 

But it turned out his cousin was a stubborn motherfucker and he found Erik in the middle of the night, when Erik was still doing paperwork in the office he’d taken over several years ago. 

“You didn’t try to become king,” T’Challa said, standing in the doorway and then having the gall to frown when he realized Erik was still working.

“Wasn’t much fucking point to that, was there?” Erik asked, finishing another requisition order for more housing. “Wasn’t much of a world left to fight. Besides, auntie is a beast, no way was I gonna mess with her.”

T’Challa’s face twitched. “But you would with me.”

“Yeah, well, you I hate,” Erik said and it seemed like he stabbed T’Challa again, because he made the same face he had at the waterfall. 

“What?”

“I still hate you,” Erik said, enunciating the words carefully. 

“Why?” T’Challa asked, wounded and confused.

“Because you were dead, and you lied to me, and you saved my life, and I needed to hate someone,” Erik said.

“You are mad at me for saving your life,” T’Challa said, and he seemed to want to gesture around the office like obviously Erik wasn’t suffering that much, still being alive.

“I asked you not to,” Erik said. “And you just, ignored me and did what you wanted because you could use me,” and T’Challa’s mouth opened. “Listen. It’s been a long five years. I’m not gonna go out and try and take your throne again, or whatever. But I’m not going to like you, and I’m not going to forgive you. Turning those Bambi eyes on me isn’t going to change that.”

“Bambi?” T’Challa asked after the silence had stretched too far.

“Sure,” Erik said, rising, and T’Challa watched him the whole way. 

“Erik,” he started. 

“I’m serious,” Erik said, and he pushed past him, not even trying to avoid him in the doorway. 

Except.

Except apparently he had somehow underestimated T’Challa. He was not the type to give up on, apparently, _anything_, least of all Erik. 

Sure, he was smart enough not to pressure Erik to his face, he just kept showing up, hovering.

M’Baku just kept grinning at him and Erik decided he had never liked him. 

The thing was T’Challa honestly seemed sad about the whole affair and since he was always, mysteriously, around, Erik couldn’t escape from that. 

“I’m not just going to forgive you,” he said, one night when he was sitting out in the gardens, his eyes closed, and felt T’Challa sit down beside him. 

“I know,” T’Challa said. “If you were going to, you would have.”

“Why do you want me to so bad, huh?” Erik asked rolling his head on the back of the bench to look over at him.

“Because I want us to be friends,” T’Challa said and Erik’s brows went all the way up.

“Sometimes you don’t get what you want,” he said. “Remember?”

T’Challa looked up at the night sky. “It’s weird you think I’m used to getting what I want.”

“Well, so far, aside from the five year bit,” and T’Challa gave him a sideways look. “You sorta have.”

“If that’s what you think,” T’Challa said softly.

Except the thing was, after that night, Erik started to notice something. 

T’Challa still looked at him with Bambi eyes and pretty much no one else. Even Nakia was almost never in the capitol anymore, and when Erik casually asked Shuri she sighed and muttered something about five years was a really long time.

This, Erik decided, was actually way more maddening than anything else T’Challa had ever done to him. Okoye only confirmed it for him when she started complaining about T’Challa and how he was around him, like she used to about the king and Nakia. 

His first reaction was to get the fuck out of dodge and move back to Oakland with Nakia to run the Wakanda outreach center, but the other, vicious and hungry part of him won out in the end. 

After all, you didn’t just bail when the king started giving you longing eyes. 

Instead the right course of action is to pin the king when he comes looking one night, getting all up into his space. “Hey,” Erik said.

“Hi,” T’Challa managed, staring at him with those big eyes of his, Erik holding him against the wall.

“So,” Erik said, resting one arm against the wall next to T’Challa’s head and leaning just a bit closer.

“So,” T’Challa said cautiously. 

“I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice.”

And he was close enough he could hear T’Challa swallow. “Have you,” he whispered, not even much of a question.

“Yeah,” Erik said, inching closer.

“And how is that?” T’Challa asked so Erik shoved their mouths together, angry and harsh and the way T’Challa’s hands came up to cling to him told him an awful lot about how right he was. 

Except then T’Challa gentled the kiss, somehow took Erik with him, his hands soft on Erik’s back, his mouth kind and Erik dug his fingers into the wall instead of into T’Challa. 

That should have been the first sign that something had changed in him, but it took him another few weeks, and several nights in T’Challa’s bed, biting him and being gentled in turn to realize he didn’t hate him anymore.

Erik didn’t know who he hated anymore.

(When he told his therapist this, they brought him a cake the next session, because after five years any time he tried to skip his appointment without a national security reason Ramonda would frog march him down to it. 

So there his therapist was, with a cake that said “congratulations on learning how not to hate everyone” in bright blue frosting.

Erik fucking hated Wakanda sometimes). 

“You know, I really did mean to keep hating you,” he told T’Challa that night, when T’Challa was sitting with his back to the headboard and reading, Erik’s head on his thighs. 

“I know,” T’Challa said, not looking up.

“I don’t hate you anymore,” Erik said, because he hadn’t admitted it yet, not out loud to T’Challa himself. 

“I know,” T’Challa said and when Erik looked up he was smiling, like he had gotten a gift, even though his eyes were still on his book.

So Erik reached up and annoyed him until he put his book away and leaned down to kiss him and maybe.

Maybe this wasn’t terrible anymore.

Maybe this was going to be okay.

He wasn’t counting on anything yet, but he felt a small corrosive spark of hope and thought, maybe that would be alright too. 

Because when T’Challa smiled at him he really thought it might be. 


End file.
